


Never Could Sharpen No Knife

by orphan_account



Category: Longmire (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:50:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Branch Connally and the forces that shaped the man. A treat for Yuletide 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Could Sharpen No Knife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justhuman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justhuman/gifts).



_Lucian Connally_

He was still three miles from the house when Lucian found him – three miles from the house, twenty minutes past sunset, and six miles in his riding boots from the draw where Lil’ Suz had put her foreleg in a hole and pitched both of them downhill.

Branch was fourteen years old and would have given anything to be five, so that his Unca Loo could have scooped him up and told him a magic tale and made all the badness _not happen_.

Once upon a time, it would have worked.  Uncle Lucian had never treated his late-come nephew like a child, but that never stopped Branch from believing the outlandish tales Lucian had told were God’s honest truth.  And if a man could get away from as many bad bandits and crazy wild injins as Lucian claimed to have evaded, then anything was possible.  Five year-old Branch would have believed anything Lucian told him about jackalopes or the far side of the moon.

But he was fourteen now, with blisters on both heels, and if he took off the worn boots, he’d still be taller than Uncle Lucian in his sock feet, and there was no undoing the ugly break in Suz’s foreleg, nor the uglier mess that Branch had made of putting the horse down, nearly three hours ago.  So Branch didn’t even look at Lucian, only hiked the heavy roping saddle higher on his shoulder and stepped around the little grulla gelding and kept walking.

“Boy, where the hell’s your horse?”

Branch swiped his fist – the one still holding Suz’s braided hackamore – across his upper lip.  Another five steps, and the tightness in his throat eased.  Not enough to stop from hurting, but now when Lucian repeated his question, Branch could physically answer.

“Bottom of Little Nattle Draw. B-broke leg.”

Lucian must have turned around to face back down the trail towards the Nattle drain, north and east of the long climb up to the house.  Branch could hardly hear the older man’s voice as he breathed, “Well, damnation.”

Branch kept walking.

The moon rose fat and nearly full just as the last of the color faded from the sky.  Lucian swung down from his horse and walked along beside Branch. The dust rose listlessly under the four pairs of feet to make a pathetic mimic of ground fog.  The grulla’s saddle creaked as he walked, and Lucian – off on the far side, and off the trail proper - crunched brush under his feet.  Branch shifted the saddle to his other hand and let the first arm dangle numbly at his side.

Another mile further on and Lucian insisted on stopping at the bottom of the next bit of rise, claiming the tough little nameless mustang had gotten winded and needed a minute to breathe.

Branch took another step and then sat the saddle down, horn against the dirt and the cantle end pointed towards the sky.  He dropped to his heels and let his forehead rest against the soft-oiled leather.  He took in a deep breath, sucking in air heavy with the old sweaty stink of horse off the blanket.  It was the last he was going to have of Lil’ Suz, and the sobs took him by surprise.

He crouched there as the weeping tore through his gut, shame and regret and the horror of having missed the first, crucial shot and having the mare scream through the echo of the pistol as it bounced off the crumbling rock walls.  There was still blood on his shirt, Branch thought, and hoped he’d have time to change before his father saw him.

Lucian waited it out, and when Branch’s breath began to come easier, he stepped around to the offside of the grulla.  “Here,” Lucian said, “throw that rig up on mine.”

They tied Branch’s saddle on top of Lucian’s – an awkward, preposterous burden.  The little mousy-grey mustang shook his head but only stepped out willingly enough when Lucian clicked at him. Branch kept to the other side of the horse, and if Lucian noticed the hand that Branch rested on the gelding’s shoulder, the older man didn’t say anything. The moon slipped high and higher as they climbed, with the broad stretch of the Milky Way arcing overhead.

The yard was lit up like noon in July by the time they crested the last rise. 

“Go on,” Lucian said. “Go wash up. I’ll take care of the gear and the horse.”  And when Branch had shaken his head – his throat thick again – Lucian had kept his grip on the reins. “Go on. Wash your face.  Tell your father I went slow coming back in.”  He turned the horse towards the stables and the close-up pen, leaving Branch to stand in the shadow of the cedars.  Almost at the edge of the light, Lucian turned around and said, “Your father’s Mex gal made that chicken sauce you like, you better eat it.”

It was another two months before his father got around to asking Branch what had become of the paint mare.  The next year, for Branch’s fifteenth birthday, Lucian offered him the grulla gelding.

 

_Henry Standing Bear_

Branch came back from Iraq with a Commendation Medal – because the big green machine didn’t give Bronze Stars to buck sergeants, no matter what the brass said – and after watching the LT who’d been demoted to running the admin section after the debacle on the road to Sadar clench her jaw and take her ARCOM ribbon, Branch just stood there and let the Colonel clip Branch’s medal to his best ACUs, his eyes locked on the middle distance.

It was just a bit of fancy color, with a heavy duty paper clip to hold it to his pocket flap, and it didn’t mean anything.

Six months later, he had left Benning and the 4 ID behind, finally, together with the sopping wet air that always hung in Georgia, no matter the season.  It was all the trees, Branch figured – Iraq never had that problem.

Despite all the bullshit, he’d thought about staying in.  Not enough to re-up in-country, which would have netted him another five grand, but Branch had seen enough of his squad mates take that dangling bait to recognize the choice for what it was.  Better to make the decision back CONUS.  It would mean more, then.

He hadn’t figured on stepping off the plane in Atlanta and sucking in a lung full of damp, moldy air.  It was that, more than anything, that made his choice for him.  He looked around the tall pines and red dirt, and it was no more home than the white dust in Baghdad.

His father threw a party for him, with all the Vietnam-aged geezers that were his father’s friends, but now he realized just how few of his father’s friends had been in service.  Plenty of men with money and influence, and plenty with the wit to mouth platitudes and accolades to Mother America. 

Only a handful who had actually worn the uniform.  Even fewer who had done as much as LT Sommers – or the five men who’d died in the IED daisy-chain trap that Sommers had led them into, following fucking _protocol_ – and gone to some fucked-up foreign country and fucking _tried_.

A good bronco rider spent a shit-load of time with his ass in the air, between the open gate and the eight second bell.  Branch knew what failure tasted like.  You didn’t get good, unless you’d spent time fucking it up. The taste of want was almost familiar.

Nothing else was.  Not the house – remodeled twice over, with three successive women since Branch had started high school – not the stables, not the white-graveled road where geo-engineers ran with impunity.

Not the empty draw where Lil’ Suz had died and the bones of his first favorite horse had been scattered by the coyotes and the wind.  Branch climbed up out of the narrow land and found Lucian’s old gelding still standing hipshot and patient, sensible as ever.  They took the long way around to the house, where another of Barlow’s friends waited for the chance to congratulate Branch for nothing much at all.

A month later, Branch found himself on the edge of the Rez, drinking beer at the Red Pony. He was two beers down when he let his eyes drift over the rim of the glass and focus on the wall below the mirror. He set the third glass down without tasting it.

“Hey.”

At the draft taps, Henry Standing Bear cocked an eyebrow towards Branch.

Branch swallowed.  “That’s you.” He nodded at the photo – an old-style film picture, the jungle background still eye-smacking green in color – and the tattered map, with markings that Branch knew well. The first deployment, they’d still been working with grids from the first Gulf War. "Pathfinder? Or..." he let the words fade away. "Something else."

Henry nodded. “Yes.”

Branch hesitated, and took another swallow of the beer – as if that was the only well of courage he had to draw from – without looking beyond the surface of the bar. “Who were you with?”

Henry’s eyes were waiting when Branch looked up. “Dead men.” The pair of roughnecks at the end of the bar called for more gin. Henry held up a single finger. “You?”

Branch snorted. “Live people. Mostly.”

Henry nodded and produced a cup of coffee from nowhere. “Here. I can pour you another, in a moment.” He went down the bar and settled the roughnecks, and then leaned his hip against the bar across from Branch.

They talked the night through – or, at least, Branch did, his voice lubricated by beer and coffee and the Baileys Henry kept slipping into Branch’s mug.

He'd known Henry - known _of_ Henry.  Everyone did - everyone who had ever had stock go missing, up on BLM land, and really wanted it back.  

You could hire Omar Rhoades - which was easier, and sometimes faster, because Henry Standing Bear was a touchy sonnabitch, especially with whites outside of bar business - or you could be patient, and get Henry's help. 

Henry was better.  And across the bar, he watched and nodded as Branch wandered down the rough trail laid by his thoughts.

“I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.”  It had to be nothing like the operations that Standing Bear had hinted at – less than hinted, obliquely implied, with a shrug of a shoulder and a jerk of his chin. Not just the desert. The photo was from Grenada, maybe, but likely someplace less publicly acknowledged.

“Do you not?”  Henry asked, and poured the last of the coffee into Branch’s mug.

“It’s not like, like you can tell me what I should do, tell my father to go to hell or to give me a place in whatever business plan he has lined up.”  He was drunk.  He had to be, to seriously contemplate telling Barlow to go burn.

Henry leaned against the bar back.  “Have you spoken to Lucian?”

Branch shrugged. “Don’t do old folks homes.  What’s it matter?  Longmire’s sheriff now.”

Henry might have smiled, might not.  “Lucian was sheriff for many years.  You might find his word carries some weight, especially with Walter Longmire.”

 

 

_Victoria Moretti_

Vic Moretti taught Branch two things – and neither one of them had been the sort of thing he had expected to learn from a woman.

Loretta Connally had taken back her maiden name four years after the divorce, and it was as Loretta Haverston that she had sent Branch postcards from Paris and Tahiti, and set up a savings account in Branch’s name.  That was a blanket thin enough for any boy to sleep under, but truth be told, none of his father’s subsequent women were any better. Maria, the long-suffering head housekeeper, had been the closest to a mother of them all.  Between them all, most of Branch’s birthdays had been observed, and the Christmas tree had been laden with presents from Santa long after Branch had cottoned onto the joke.

They’d taught him that women were soft, winsome, and likely to try to use him in their perpetual wars with his father. (Some might mock him for using the rhetoric of violence to describe his father’s relationships, but Branch didn’t care. Even in Iraq, he’d never even heard of so many open fronts at once.)

None of them had prepared him for Vic Moretti, who blew into the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department like a weird easterly Chinook – melting things that should have remained solid and scorching old firm foundations into dust.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

It had been Vic’s third week on the job, and already Longmire had sunk back into the wallowing pit he’d been living in since shortly after Branch had hired on. Some days Longmire was in the office, some days he wasn’t, and that day was one of the latter.

Branch had the fingerprint kit half balanced on the reading room sink, half propped on his hip, and three of Tim O’Neil’s four right hand digits marked on the card.  The new deputy stood hipshot and scowling in the doorway, her unpainted nails drumming on the doorframe.

Branch blew out his breath.  “Taking fingerprints.” And he was.  He’d even left a space – on this, the second try – for Tim’s missing ring finger.

“Like fuck you are.  You’re embarrassing Absaroka County, the great state of Wyoming, and all of fucking fly-over-country with your lack of basic law enforcement technique.”

Branch breathed in, slow and careful, and smeared Tim’s little finger across the card.  Shit.

“See?”

Tim looked at Branch and shrugged. “It is kinda messy. Ain’t there supposed to be like, loops and whorls and shit?”

Branch growled, “Shut up,” as Vic snorted. Without turning his head, Branch said to the mirror, “I don’t suppose you’d like to try.”

As if she had been waiting to be asked, Vic swooped in with one hand and snatched up the roller, plate, cards and all, and said, “Watch and learn, cowboy.”

Five minutes later, Tim was back in lockup and the Ferg was holding the card up to the light, studying the clear prints marked across the card.  Vic carefully wiped the excess ink from her finger tips, her mouth set and her eyebrows still arced.

She was unlike any woman Branch had met west of the Mississippi, and reminded him more than a little of a few of the better MPs in his company.  She had a mouth like a Marine and a fist like the kick of a yearling colt; a grin like a viper and a coyote’s sense of humor, that never went more than five minutes without something to laugh at.

Vic was lightning in tight denim, and nothing that Branch thought of taking home at night, never minding who or what he’d done in the desert.

Moretti stepped in where Longmire had let the reins slip, and bullied Ferg into something like proactive work, and offered Branch the expertise she’d picked up in five years of the vicious streets of Philadelphia. 

“Look, here,” she said, at the first hit and run they’d worked together.  “Don’t touch, _look_.”  She straightened up, put her shoulders back, and mimed stumbling as she opened the door, to match the scuff marks on the ground.  Her hand waved at the side of the car.  “See, there?  Dust there.  That’s the hot spot.  Never trust the fuckers when they tell you they never touched anything.”

Which was an odd attitude, considering where Vic hailed from.

“No,” she’d said, when the Ferg had asked. “No fucking sign of any brotherly love to go around. Not while I was there.”

Ferg had swallowed.  “Not, uh, sisterly love, either?”

Vic had looked at him from under her eyebrows.  “No. Not your mother, either. Clean that shit off your desk next time, I don’t need mustard stains on the reports.” She slapped the folder closed. “Good job following up with the brother.  We can ride back out first thing tomorrow; ask the neighbors if they saw the trailer after last week.”

“I- um – I got that. Vic,” Branch said.  “No sense in you running all the way out there.”

Vic looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “What do you want?”

Caught, Branch shrugged. “Leave out early, tonight.  I’ll make it up in the morning, let you sleep in.”  He put on his most casual air, kept his elbows in, tried to not look overly imposing. “Up to you.”

Vic pinned him with a look, but she had a weakness for late mornings.  It was one of her habits that never took to the rest of the office.  She sent Branch off with a scowl and a foul suggestion of what he could spend his extra hours doing.

He didn’t take her up on it.

Instead, he drove most of an hour to the Campbell county line, and the Kicking Mule Bar, and Cady Longmire, who had hinted that she might be found there of a Thursday evening, when the line dancing was good.

The other thing that Vic had taught him – aside from the basics of fingerprinting, and an intermediate course in ballistics, and advanced studies in profanity – was what he didn’t appreciate in a woman.

Cady Longmire was tall, stacked like a brick shithouse, and knew her own mind, but she’d never swing on a man, or tell him to _go fuck himself sideways with a seashell_. 

His father's women were soft things, compliant and passive-aggressive and fragile as the willows down in the slough.

Vic Moretti was a far-traveling storm, that swept away everything in its path.

Cady had eyes like grey granite, like the bones of the earth, like a woman that Branch could see himself building a life with.

 

_Barlow Connally_

His father taught Branch how to hold a golf club, and how to swing a five iron.

He taught Branch to pay no heed to the balls lost deep in the brush – _no sense in wasting time after something that wants that bad to get lost._

He bought Branch his first pair of golf shoes.  Barlow never managed to buy an appreciation for the most useless set of footwear Branch ever owned.

Barlow had his secretary send a care package every week, like clockwork – mostly full of items off the Support the Troops checklist, with two kinds of oreos and a giant package of Vienna fingers, even though Branch hated the things.  He handed out the cream-filled cookies to any and all comers, and kept Maria’s oatmeal raisin cookies for himself.

Barlow bought him coffee from tiny islands in South Asia and served it to his son in pale, fragile china.

Barlow bought him a damn good shot at Sheriff, and when that went to hell, Barlow paid out ugly vicious bluster for Branch’s freedom.

Barlow bought him a pack of business cards and a new shiny suit with an Eastern man’s cloth tie.

Barlow taught Branch the price of everything and, in the end, the value of nothing.

 

_Walt Longmire_

Old men faded. Branch knew this, and figured everyone did.

They’d all known this in the 4ID – old men were weak, were soft, and no matter how courageous they’d been in their youth, they relearned caution and flinching by the time they had a sleeve worth of stripes or a collar heavy with brass. Flinging oneself into the wind from a paratrooper door, or charging up a street while lead tore holes in already shattered concrete, that was a young man’s life.

Branch saw it in the old drunks he brought in – livers shot, bodies bruised by beatings they could no longer shrug off like their younger drinking buddies. He saw it in his father, whose ambitions were as broad as they ever were, but whose conquests – women, land, business – grew smaller and more tawdry every year.  And he saw it in Walt Longmire.

Whatever the man had been in his youth – and Branch had heard the stories, of the trouble he’d caused with Standing Bear on and off the Rez, of the wide swath Longmire had cut as a Marine investigator in the drug-infested Philippines, and then later as Lucian Connally’s enforcer – Longmire had aged with the passing years.  There was a pattern to it – a man rose, walked tall for a time, and then his shadow shrank away into nothing.

Hell, even Lucian had eventually seen the light and checked himself into the gruel-fueled home for senile old fools.  It happened to scrubby mustang studs, it happened to wolves, it happened to men.  

Longmire sat in his office and stared out the window at the passing geese. He ignored calls from the DA and from Judge Mayhew. He sent the Ferg out to deal with hard-edged drillers who walked all over the soft and fumbling young man.  He hired a woman from back East and threw her into the winds off the Bighorns. He looked at his daughter with empty eyes and drained life and energy out of Cady every time he touched her.

(Branch tried to fill Cady up again – put his promise into every evening they spent together, in every brush of his lips, in all the ways he held her, saying without words everything he meant. _I love you. I need you. I will never leave you alone, I will always protect you._  But Cady’s eyes and heart kept turning back to her father, and her native honesty eventually led her to break away, and break something deep in Branch when she left.)

But Longmire had refused to give it up – being Sheriff, being the law, being top wolf in the pack - even after he’d lost his wife.  Even though everyone – even Vic and Ruby – could see that Longmire had lost it. It was a mercy that Branch had offered him – to go down fighting, to lose to a younger, better man.

Branch had never seen a man come back, from that far down.

After the Ferg had left, Branch stared at the white box and its black lines.  The house was quiet and still around him – full of expensive bits of art and décor, but for all that as empty as the label on the cardboard box.

He let one hand rest on the Baikal – another expensive, rare, old thing of his father’s.  Not his.  Of all the things Branch had thought to hold – Cady, the Sheriff’s office, glory, revenge – so little remained.  His fingers traced the markings carved into the foregrip.  So easy to let go of the rest.

(He'd do it with one shot, this time.)

(But not here, not in this empty house, not inside these walls.)

The wooden stock was warm under his palm. Branch opened his fingers, let his grip leave the gun. He folded his hands together, laced his fingers over his mouth, traced the edge of his jaw with one rough thumb. Felt the ridge where Longmire’s fist had laid him in the dust.

There was no shame in being bucked off by a tough horse, or in being beaten by a tougher - _better_ \- man.

It wasn't the fall, but how you got up again.

// _end_ //

**Author's Note:**

> Not doing this again. 
> 
> Pre-series/S1-S3; mostly TV series characterization with some novel seep; Spoilers through the end of S3; PG-13 for Moretti mouth. Title from the Corb Lund song “Always Keep An Edge on Your Knife” (From the album ‘Hair In My Eyes Like A Highland Steer’). Highly recommended as a Longmire soundtrack.
> 
> Update: Edited 25 Dec for minor typos/misspellings, and (more significantly) with the fifth part that I kept struggling with, prior to Yuletide reveal. My apologies to anyone who originally clicked on this story looking for a femslash fic. My bad. Firearms references supported by the Internet Movie Firearms Database - http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Longmire - but the brand supposition is mine. 
> 
> Many thanks to my beta extraordinaire, and to the Yuletide mods, for letting me play yet again.


End file.
